Strengths: Original Water Canvas foundation; supremely smooth, seamless-finish powders and powder blush; most eyeshadows are great; excellent brow-enhancing options; several great lipsticks with some of the best colors around, whether you want soft nudes or riveting reds; excellent powder highlighter.

Vincent Longo is a fashion makeup artist with a long list of celebrity and supermodel clients. To give you a little background, Australian-born Vincent Longo has been in the beauty business for quite a while. Believing "all women are beautiful," he studied makeup artistry in Italy and eventually migrated to New York, where he was the featured makeup artist for one of Cindy Crawford's first professional photo shoots, circa 1981. Longo's resume continues with consulting and makeup artistry work for such well-known brands as Revlon, Elizabeth Arden, and Estee Lauder. His namesake line launched in 1994 and is sold primarily at Sephora boutiques and at Barneys New York.

Makeup artist–helmed lines usually present a well-balanced range of performance-oriented products in line with what's needed to create a variety of looks, from casual to theatrical. Although Longo's assembly of products allows for such creativity, the quality isn't as uniform as most competing makeup artist–type lines. However, there are a few standouts in this collection that make it worth checking out, just watch out for the blunders that don't paint a pretty picture.

You'll find the foundation shade range to be a strong point of this line, yet in most cases it's counterbalanced by insufficient UVA protection for the bases with sunscreen. The brushes are underwhelming and lack the quality you might expect from an artist's line, and the mascaras pale in comparison to what you'll find from Lancome, L'Oreal, or Maybelline. Almost all of the powders and powder-based products (blush, eyeshadow) are exceptional, with elegant blending and smoothness.

If your budget allows, these pricey, well-formulated options are a consideration. There's certainly promise and proof among the top products here, but this line has yet to reach the status of one-stop makeup shopping in the same manner that lines like Stila or Laura Mercier have.